Drawing Suburban Fairy Tales

Drawing a comic strip is a thoughtful process. Most of the time I sit down for an hour or so and sketch a whole bunch of ideas into my sketchbook — whatever comes to mind, good or bad. Then the following day I’ll go back to my sketchbook and re-read my ideas. Sometimes the ideas are really great and they go right into the comic strip. Other times the ideas are so-so, but have potential, so I attempt to re-write them to make them better. Other times the ideas are simply awful and I put a big X through them.

Sitting down to write these ideas is a pretty straightforward process, but sometimes an idea comes to me out of the blue. That’s when I have scramble to write it down somewhere because I know that in two minutes I’ll be distracted by something else and forget the idea entirely.

One example of an idea popping up is when I was sitting at my booth at NY Comic Con. I was drawing sketches for fans who purchased a copy of my book. Most of the sketches were characters in simple poses, but one sketch featuring Red Riding Hood spawned an idea that I thought would be great for the actual comic strip. So I made sure to snap a picture of that sketch before I gave it away so I could remember it for later use in Suburban Fairy Tales.

Below is the original sketch idea from NY Comic Con. The other photos are each step I take in drawing a strip — from pencils to the final product. The final completed strip was posted on October 28, 2011.